Off the Page: Screenwriting in the Era of Media Convergence

Off the Page

Off the Page

Screenwriting in the Era of Media Convergence

DANIEL BERNARDI AND JULIAN HOXTER

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2017 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bernardi, Daniel, author. | Hoxter, Julian, author.

Title: Off the page : screenwriting in the era of media convergence / Daniel Bernardi and Julian Hoxter.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017005898 (print) | LCCN 2017008436 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520285644 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520285651 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520961043 (eBook)

Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture authorship. | Motion picture plays. | Screenwriters—United States. | Television writers—United States. | Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)

Classification: LCC PN1996 .B467 2017 (print) | LCC PN1996 (ebook) | DDC 808.2/3—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005898

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: SCREENWRITING OFF THE PAGE

1. MILLENNIAL MANIC: CRISIS AND CHANGE IN THE BUSINESS OF SCREENWRITING

2. ATOP THE TENTPOLE: HOLLYWOOD SCREENWRITING TODAY

3. RUNNING THE ROOM: SHOWRUNNING IN EXPANDED TELEVISION

4. NEW MARKETS AND MICROBUDGETS: INDEPENDENT STORYTELLERS

5. SCREENWRITER 2.0: THE LEGITIMATION OF WRITING FOR VIDEO GAMES

CONCLUSION: SCRIPTING BOUNDARIES

Notes

Index

We dedicate this book to our partners

for feeding us ideas and challenging our assumptions . . .

Helen (Daniel)

SL (Julian)

Acknowledgments

We were ably assisted in our research for this book by the professional and always collegial staff at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills. The Herrick’s archive of screenplays and other materials is a wonderful resource for film scholars, and no matter how often we visit, we continue to find new and important insights there.

The support of other friends, colleagues, and talented students in San Francisco State University’s School of Cinema has also been invaluable during the development of this project. In particular we are grateful to our research assistant, Allyce L. Ondrika, for her excellent work pulling together and parsing material on feature and story development at Marvel and DC and to our friend and colleague Aaron Kerner, for his sage commentary on an early draft of the material on online content creation.

We are also grateful to our undergraduate and graduate students, specifically those in Julian’s CINE 568 Creating Story Worlds class, with whom we field-tested the chapter on writing for video games. Their in-depth knowledge of and thoughtful engagement with the contemporary ludisphere was invaluable to the further development of the chapter—if your parents tell you playing video games is a waste of time, show them this book!

We are most grateful to the screenwriters, filmmakers, online content creators, and film scholars who contributed their time, thought, and material support to this project, whether officially or unofficially, and in various capacities. The list is long, and it includes a number of friends and colleagues whose valuable input remains anonymous but no less important than the subjects of our prominent case studies. Particular gratitude goes out, inter alia, to Pamela Gray, Robert Moreland, Travis Mathews, Michael Grais, Scott Sublett, Scott Boswell, Bryan Darling, Gary Whitta, Denise R. Mann, Shawn Ryan, Karen and Lisa Alkofer, Mike Stabile, Sam Hamm, Richard Walter, Kevin Sandler (his early work with Daniel on The Shield was invaluable to this project), Lloyd A. Silverman, Joseph McBride, William Tyler Smith, Michael Whalen, Cheryl Valenzuela, Sarah Dunham, Ariel Sinelnikoff, David Carson, Andy Horton, Will Frampton (a.k.a. Quickybaby), and Joshua Grannell (a.k.a. Peaches Christ). Any errors and omissions are ours alone.

Finally, many thanks are due our editors at the University of California Press: Mary Francis who fostered the project from its inception, and Raina Polivka, her able replacement after Mary left to take up her new post as editorial director of Michigan Publishing. Their enthusiasm for the project throughout its development, combined with sage advice and considerable patience, is greatly appreciated.

Introduction

Screenwriting off the Page

The product of the dream factory is not one of the same nature as are the material objects turned out on most assembly lines. For them, uniformity is essential; for the motion picture, originality is important. The conflict between the two qualities is a major problem in Hollywood.

HORTENSE POWDERMAKER¹

A screenplay writer, screenwriter for short, or scriptwriter or scenarist is a writer who practices the craft of screenwriting, writing screenplays on which mass media such as films, television programs, comics or video games are based.

Wikipedia

In the documentary Dreams on Spec (2007), filmmaker Daniel J. Snyder tests studio executive Jack Warner’s famous line: Writers are just schmucks with Underwoods. Snyder seeks to explain, for example, why a writer would take the time to craft an original spec script without a monetary advance and with only the dimmest of possibilities that it will be bought by a studio or producer. Extending anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker’s 1950s framing of Hollywood in the era of Jack Warner and other classic Hollywood moguls as a dream factory, Dreams on Spec profiles the creative and economic nightmares experienced by contemporary screenwriters hoping to clock in on Hollywood’s assembly line of creative uniformity.

There is something to learn about the craft and profession of screenwriting from all the characters in this documentary. One of the interviewees, Dennis Palumbo (My Favorite Year, 1982), addresses the downside of the struggling screenwriter’s life with a healthy dose of pragmatism: A writer’s life and a writer’s struggle can be really hard on relationships, very hard for your mate to understand. Your ups and downs, the fact that you’re spending all of these hours doing something that doesn’t seem to have a tangible reward. Not to mention the financial strain. Because for most writers they have to take day jobs that don’t bring them the kind of money and security that their mate would want, particularly if children start coming into the equation.² Palumbo reminds us that many professional screenwriters struggle to make ends meet, a fact exacerbated by often-stark familial realities that undercut the aspirational myth of the economy of screenwriting.

As Dreams on Spec suggests, screenwriters have never had it easy in the hierarchy of cinema preproduction. They have always lived at the bottom of the Hollywood totem pole, their director and actor colleagues habitually eclipsing them in the cultural and economic discourse. Equally problematic, the creative freedom of the contemporary Hollywood screenwriter has been increasingly constrained in recent years as the list of genres and stories that studios deem fundable shrinks to an unprecedented low. The major studios are operating with greatly reduced production slates, making little more in-house than a few high-budget tentpole movies, or potential financial blockbusters, a scattering of teen and romantic comedies, and the occasional prestige drama often strategized as awards bait or to pacify important talent and their agents. The budgets of their shrinking development departments have been slashed, and so have the project pipelines that used to offer the possibility of funding for aspiring and established screenwriters alike, even if the movies they worked on never got made. As a consequence, the average feature screenwriter’s family is more likely to go hungry today than it is to bask in prestige and associated riches.

THE SCREENWRITING FACTORY

Hollywood is buying very few original screenplays, in part because it is producing more and more of its films for an expanding global market. Character-driven drama, once a mainstay of studio and independent production, has increasingly been moved away from the movie theater to smaller screens. Production in the largely co-opted prestige independent sector has also shrunk from the boom it experienced in the early 1990s. On the one hand, microbudget production, fueled by digital technology and reduced production costs, is booming; yet it is far from easy for a successful microbudget screenwriter, who often doubles as a project’s director and triples as its producer, to make a living from no-to-low-budget moviemaking. On the other hand, making a mark at microbudget is one way she or he may be discovered.

In the last two decades the industrial context for a screenwriter’s labor has been changing faster than at any time since the coming of sound. For almost the entire history of cinema, Jack Warner’s schmuck, or what we might now call the traditional screenwriter—or, to borrow from the lexicon of the tech industry, screenwriter 1.0—wrote either for the big screen of the movie theater or, after its introduction, for the small screen of television. Today’s writer—screenwriter 2.0—writes in the era of media convergence, an era that foreshadows the end of cinema as we think we know it. This new or convergent screenwriter is likely to practice her craft in new media and across multiple screens. Markets and media are changing and with them the craft and careers of those who write for those transforming industries and platforms. All is not lost, therefore, for the craft of screenwriting, despite the unprecedented reduction of opportunities to hit it rich with a spec script. Opportunities abound for writers willing and able to think off the page.

Dreams on Spec both understands the histories of the dream factory’s own crafts and tells their stories through a well-established mix of how to break in stories and, once in, war stories of exploitation. For example, Snyder’s documentary tells a compelling story about the struggles of aspiring screenwriters from within what film scholar Steven Maras calls the practitioner and business frames of industry discourse. The practitioner frame, Maras writes, tends to be about advice, experience, and the so-called creative process. The business frame, in contrast, tends to be about industrial activities such as deal making and pitching.³ Screenwriting professionals, along with the screenwriting paraindustry gurus (people and businesses that sell the hidden value of screenwriting to aspiring writers), typically address their craft uncritically from within these practitioner and business frames. They circumscribe the self-reflexive discourse through which screenwriting practice is framed within the industry. Missing from Snyder’s otherwise provocative documentary, for instance, is an exploration of the effects of media convergence on both contemporary writers and the conglomerate studios that simultaneously drive and are driven by the craft of screenwriting. Missing, too, is how the screenwriters’ trade union, the Writers Guild of America (WGA), functionally accedes in the propping up of an increasingly modernized assembly line that needs fewer and fewer original writers. The WGA’s de facto stance is, in part, due to the narrow self-interest of its established membership and, in part, because its influence has been marginalized by and within the new media industries.

Hollywood limits the opportunities for aspiring writers while enhancing the viability of the few established writers who can write to contemporary tentpole formulas. It also co-opts the efforts of the WGA, which is obliged to focus much of its work within the default employment formula presented by the studios and producers. Snyder’s documentary, like much of the paraindustry, offers valuable insights into the business frame of screenwriting yet fails to address explicitly the conundrum of the studio/guild complex.

As we show in chapters 1 and 5, the wider the definition of professional screenwriting becomes, the harder it has been for the WGA to spread its jurisdictional umbrella to cover the new creative and industrial contexts in which professional screenwriters now strive to make a living. Even the writers’ strike of 2007–8, which was fought over the economic implications of media convergence for the craft, centered less on increasing membership and thus expanding the ranks to different kinds of writers than on ensuring its established members remained economically viable as studios spread their interest across new delivery platforms. As a result, the new convergent screenwriter is less likely to be a member of the guild or even to aspire to join it.

To tackle the contemporary world of screenwriters and the screenwriting economy, we engage critically with Maras’s practitioner and business frames through an analysis of a range of industrial texts such as the media trade press, craft guild publications, paraindustrial testimonials of all kinds, online outlets for screenwriters’ discussions, and other records of and responses to the guild’s collective action. We also look at scripts and production documents such as studio notes, as well as fiction films and documentaries. As professor-types, we also engage extant film and media scholarship; however, we are always keen to work between the registers of the paraindustrial and scholarly discourses that frame the craft of screenwriting for different purposes and for different audiences. We look at all—and employ all—critically and, we hope the reader will find, creatively.

Our work in chapters 2, 3, and 4 is also underpinned by interviews with working screenwriters from all sectors of the industry. Some of these interviews were conducted as background research and remain anonymous at the request of the subject. At the same time, we also offer several substantial interview-based case studies of prominent writers such as Pamela Gray (Conviction, 2010) and Shawn Ryan (The Shield, 2002–8) and others who are perhaps less well known but are navigating professional challenges that illustrate and bring into focus important aspects of the state of the screenwriting craft today. These interviews are intended to explore the attitudes unique and common to screenwriters in the contemporary moment, with an emphasis on current craft and trade practices, to illustrate the effects that broader corporate practices are having on the careers of working writers.

To be sure, interviews with professional screenwriters are also texts that require critical interpretation. In the research context they function as both primary and secondary evidence: evidence that either goes directly to a specific point, perhaps revealing industrial discourse, or that helps contextualize a broader point. Nonetheless, the subjects of these interviews are just as embedded in culture—and, at times, the paraindustry—as those who sell the dreams of screenwriting via the usual how to and war stories. Traditional screenwriters are well practiced in selling themselves, their industry, their experiences, and their ideas. Indeed, this kind of practiced self-promotion is a core professional skill among members of all the major Hollywood crafts. We are thus always careful to relate our interviews to wider issues and debates in contemporary screenwriting, as well as to the scholarly field that sees these types of texts as one of many forms of evidence. In this way the personal stories of our subjects should be taken to be illustrative and contextual rather than definitive.

We can say the same about our use of the myriad texts that make up the screenwriting paraindustry. One need only search Google for how to sell a blockbuster screenplay to find a host of reputable and not-so-reputable institutions and individuals selling the hidden method to creative success, as well as screenwriting professors professing a winning practitioner formula and the associated dreams that will come true for those undergraduates and graduate students who learn how to write to formula. As we will discuss in more detail in our conclusion, film schools, even the most competitive and prestigious like UCLA, USC, NYU, and AFI, still market traditional screenwriting curricula with the aim of attracting students through the implied promise of Hollywood success. High demand from potential students and the economic imperatives of modern higher education have also ensured that, when there is insufficient space in their prestigious screenwriting programs, aspiring students that are not admitted can nonetheless secure the imprimatur of the institutions by taking screenwriting classes through their online or extension programs. Indeed, paraindustrial discourses—the selling of dreams of success, of the narrative of breaking in to share in Hollywood’s riches—are now helping to meet the revenue needs of both public and private higher education.

The trade book market is equally rich with how to make it as a screenwriter books; a simple search of Amazon.com offers an algorithmic library of options to the buyer in search of Hollywood originality by way of the screenplay page. Hence, this dimension of the paraindustry, from how-to websites and books to formal and informal film education, is in the business of marketing the fantasy of breaking in from the perspective of Maras’s third story and structure frame. Here Maras refers to accounts of the nuts and bolts of writing a screenplay, viewed through an empirical lens. Execute carefully, the narratives of the story and structure frame advise, assemble with precision according to previously blueprinted formulae, and understand how the industry came to work as it does, and the student screenwriter in and outside academe might just sell that spec script.

This educational dimension of the paraindustry also provides us with primary and secondary evidence. Screenwriting manuals, for example, offer blueprints for screenplay design that, in effect, sell variant narratives of success through conformity rather than innovation. From the perspective of film and media studies it is easy to dismiss these manuals and textbooks on the grounds of a long list of scholarly and perspectival limitations. Viewed through the discourses that give some texture to the screenwriting profession, however, many of these manuals offer sound practical advice and self-reflexive insights that shouldn’t be dismissed or marginalized on the grounds of scholarly antipathy to Hollywood orthodoxies alone or, for that matter, scholarly debates that seek to limit evidence to textual analysis, critical theory, and, of course, canonical methods. We take them seriously yet engage with them critically.

Whether screenwriters and screenwriting professors like it or not, their profession is engaged in one of the most rule-bound forms of creative writing. Many of these rules—such as a prevailing three-act screenplay form that requires specific dramatic developments to happen at specified moments—are practical accretions that speak to the collaborative history of the medium and apply to many innovative independent features as much as they do to the most formulaic genre stories. It is precisely because of the particular kind of insight that they offer and because of the work they do in propagating and sustaining the realities and myths of the screenwriting profession that the paraindustry is worthy of critical attention, both as complex discourse and as primary evidence. As we hope to show in this book, success in screenwriting trades directly on the ability of the writer to work creatively within the multiple accreted constrictions of her or his chosen profession. And that includes the parlance of a diverse paraindustry. We take it that our readers will bring their own critical judgment to our use of manuals, interviews, textbooks, and related paraindustry artifacts.

We also trust that they will do the same in parsing the attitudes of screenwriting professionals among whom there exists both a fair amount of critical insight and a commitment to a brand of industrial spin. UCLA screenwriting professor Richard Walter, for example, offers a good reason why his students would do well not to focus too hard too soon on the aspect of their careers that we could place within Maras’s business frame. Although he doesn’t use that kind of scholarly language, Walter is all in on the practitioner and story and structure frames because he has recognized that focusing on the business frame will only sway an aspiring screenwriter either to focus on riches over story or to give up entirely. The prominent professor in effect tells his students that one needs to be a bit of a schmuck to enter the screenwriting profession. He encourages aspiring screenwriters to focus on story, character, thematic development—the stuff of a good Hollywood script—and to live with a degree of poverty. Indeed, many of the points we make in this book from our own historical and critical perspectives elucidate the harsh reality of the craft and industry that prompts and underpins his position as a screenwriting teacher.

So do the many insights offered by scholars in such diverse disciplinary fields as textual analysis, industry studies, and production culture studies. Here scholars such as John Thornton Caldwell figure in our story. A pioneer of production studies who draws on Powdermaker’s important anthropological fieldwork of several decades earlier, Caldwell encourages research that helps ground a scholarly enterprise focused on the here, now and how of Hollywood. Discussing Caldwell in greater detail later in this chapter, we treat his work and the work of other scholars much the same way we treat manuals, interviews, WGA rhetoric, and other paraindustry texts: both critically and creatively. Hence, we’re interested in more than a synthesis of the craft-centric frames of the screenwriting profession today, engaging also with Maras’s fourth frame, the frame of screenwriting as discourse. At the same time, we rely broadly on the production-studies method to help us foreground the ways in which today’s screenwriters write both on and off the page—that is, how they work in and out of the production process today.

Professional screenwriters, like the moviegoers they serve, are not merely dupes alienated by the false ideologies of a conglomerate industry. Those who have come to understand the ever-shifting complexities of the movie business are still able to navigate and adapt to it with some success. Their brand of industrial spin provides us with diffuse entry points to this aspect of cinema’s convergent turn. At the same time, of course, today’s working screenwriter is being asked to put new syntax to tried-and-true formulas designed to improve the economic performance of the studio’s parent company. The days of Hollywood studios being independent corporate entities concerned primarily with making movies are long gone, as the screenwriter Billy Ray (The Hunger Games, 2012; Captain Phillips, 2013) noted in a recent polemical piece titled A Warning for Our Next Great Screenwriters:

When I started writing there were still a few mavericks out there; a few gunslingers who ran studios.

These were people who went with their guts and would make a movie just because they believed in it.

But that’s not the process anymore.

Today, before a studio chair can green-light a movie, that movie must also be blessed by the head of marketing, the head of foreign sales, and the head of home video.

It must be subjected to a process called running the numbers, which means that the movie’s cost—or, downside—is compared against its potential value because of its cast and what it might do in foreign markets.

This process takes into account every variable except the variable which actually matters—the one that can’t possibly be gauged by any sort of calculus—which is whether or not the movie’s going to be any good.

And yet the process continues.⁴

Professor Walter’s advice points to another trend, if only at the margins, that either rationalizes hope or suggests a path out of the rhetoric of the tentpole paradigm: where there is creative will and talent, and perhaps some luck to go along with pluck, today’s working screenwriter can find opportunities to tell other kinds of stories. And this is more than hinted at in the broad definition of the word screenwriter offered in the reference from Wikipedia with which we opened this introduction. This so-called nonspecialist resource is aptly suggesting that the contemporary screenwriter might be writing screenplays for comics and video games as much as for movies and television. In other words, Wikipedia’s definition speaks to the transformative expansion of the screenwriting profession in the flattening era of media convergence.

And this is a key concern of this book. For students, film enthusiasts, and aspiring screenwriters to understand the new screenwriter, they, like us, have to rethink the two constituent words that have combined to delimit the traditional screenwriter: screen and writer. Today’s screenwriters can write for a panoply of screens, pushing and at times exploding tried-and-true formulae. They also collaborate in the broader scripting processes—to deploy another insightful term borrowed from Maras—of syncretistic media texts with professionals from other crafts. In so doing, they require us to expand our definition of writing beyond the simple inscription of words on a page and to think of the scripting of a project as a collaboration that may extend authorship far beyond the traditional boundaries of the craft of screenwriting. This begs the question: how has the craft of screenwriting changed to accommodate those screens and those convergent collaborations?

Off the Page: Screenwriting in the Era of Media Convergence explores how both the craft and the industrial context of screenwriting are changing to accommodate new forms of writing on new platforms in a new millennium and how we got to this point of dramatic change. Of course, many established Hollywood screenwriters continue to do what they have always done: they write movies and television shows. Yet those writers are now working on conglomerate assembly lines that exert particular commercial and creative pressures on their labor. As old markets and opportunities contract, new generations of writers—and some established writers—are expanding the profession, moving it away from media familiar to previous generations of screenwriters and engaging with new markets, new media forms, and new technologies in their search for creative opportunity and economic security. These new screenwriters do not merely stand on the shoulders of fellow schmucks; they also walk where there are few if any giant footprints to follow.

The episodic and serial narratives of comics and the less linear and more interactive stories found in many of today’s video games have become lucrative arenas for the screenwriters who increasingly work across platforms. Television drama and comedy storytelling, which still have a well-established apprenticeship model, are alive and well on HBO, Showtime, FX, and even the old major broadcast networks (some would argue in ways that are more interesting than big-screen storytelling). And then there’s the online world of expanded television (Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, inter alia), independent features, and short films. There is creative opportunity for screenwriters and independent writer-directors in the complex, converging business of show business, though perhaps not so much in many studio executives’ offices.

Although providing some opportunities for screenwriters, the issue of transmedia storytelling is more complex than that of comics, video games, and television. For clarification, we see a narrow distinction between transmedia storytelling as an (always) emerging practice for the creative development of story worlds and storytelling and corporate transmedia as more or less straightforward synergistic cross-platform marketing strategies. In the former context the development of an intellectual property (IP) or a story world that can be explored across subtly interacting narrative and expositional frameworks in different media, often without a conventional ending, let alone a clear act structure, offers unique opportunities for writers to engage with the limits of contemporary digital and online culture. A famous example of this was the creative extrapolation of the Matrix universe from movies, through different kinds of video games, including a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), to comics, to animated shorts (The Animatrix).⁵ In the latter context conglomerate Hollywood is simply able to maximize the monetization of IP by marketing and spinning off products across media in ways that do not necessarily deepen the storytelling potential of the material or open up opportunities for working screenwriters at the margins of economic success and industrial cachet. The new starship designs, characters, troop types, and combat scenarios seen in the science fiction war movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) will soon make their appearance across the tabletop product line of licensee Fantasy Flight Games in games such as X Wing, Star Wars: Armada, Star Wars: Destiny, and Star Wars: Imperial Assault, for example.

Hollywood has experimented with more creative transmedia marketing. At its most innovative this involves elements of complex interactive storytelling and gaming, as with the yearlong, Internet-driven Why So Serious teaser puzzles anticipating the release of the Batman movie The Dark Knight in 2008. To date, and as the WGA strike of 2007–8 foreshadowed, the investment of marketing resources at this level is disproportionate to its effect on the box office. Given its limited impact on the corporate bottom line, creative transmedia marketing of this type does not appear likely to become commonplace anytime soon.⁶

We engage these constraints through the range of texts, or evidence, we introduce above, revealing the repercussions of conglomeration, globalization, and union co-optation; we then turn to the creative ways writers are working through all attempts to, in the political philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s conception of ideology, coerce them into consenting to the Hollywood matrix.⁷ For Gramsci, advanced capitalism works to establish hegemony, or temporary domination, that seeks the consent of labor through the coercive forces, the give and take, of ideology. For the screenwriter outsider, this consent manifests itself around the narratives of breaking in and persevering in the hope of selling a script and becoming rich and popular. For the Hollywood insider it is manifested in an acceptance by the creative worker of coercive, underhanded, and adhesive practices on the part of employers. When the most egregious of these practices are resisted, through collective action and even the withdrawal of labor, it is with the expectation of limited gains weighed against the fear of losing the dubious privilege of continuing to occupy the spot at the base of the conglomerate totem pole. The subordination of the screenwriter to the studio system, the narrative of the duped schmuck, has helped to produce a hegemonic common sense that successful Hollywood screenwriting is about conforming to a particular kind of storytelling.

We frame this ideological reading within the larger corporate and cultural trends that inform the industry. We analyze the recent history of the Hollywood studio development paradigm alongside different iterations of independent screenwriting, including microbudget and expanded-screenwriting practices, theories, and microeconomic models. Our goal is to write critically about the American screenwriting profession, to engage with its current industrial state, and to contextualize the commonsense discourses of the academic and paraindustries in an effort to offer a creative analysis. Equally important, we engage in the close textual analysis of screenplays, considering them as historical documents that communicate much more than story. Indeed, screenplays and similar texts reveal a great deal about the industry for which they are written through their format, through how their prosodic styles are implemented by their writers to target implied readers, and through how they are read within the industry. Recent examples of screenplay form and content also reveal how the screenwriter’s labor is, in some measure, adapting to technological developments both within and outside their own craft and to new modes of onscreen storytelling. In this turn of the enterprise some of these scripts demonstrate creative resistance to conglomeration and ideology in the working world of the screenwriter. In grounding our readings in this way, we attempt to avoid, or at least to minimize, the kind of critical self-indulgence that can diminish the value of close textual analysis.

How do corporate interests, union struggles, and paraindustrial myths frame today’s screenwriting profession? What is the current state of Hollywood’s tentpole paradigm, and how has it solidified the opportunities of a few screenwriters to the exclusion of others and reinforced economic hierarchies within the craft? What role does teamwork play in television and even video game writing? Where are writers now turning to express their ideas in words, to create different worlds through story, to engage audiences in meaningful ways, and to make a living? More abstractly, in what ways do the radical changes in the mediated work of storytelling portend screenwriter 2.0?

In addressing these questions, the following chapters will consider the potential of new technologies and platforms (including interactivity and the Internet) that are transforming the screenwriter’s understanding of character, plot, and structure. They also consider the role of the screenwriting industry: from the conglomerates to social media companies and festivals. The early chapters set the stage with our own additions to the business frame long-fetishized by the paraindustry, considering the industrial context and labor relations of the tentpole era of Hollywood screenwriting, where the latest iteration of the blockbuster holds up the financial interests of multinational media companies. Later chapters reveal the opportunities and practices in independent and convergent media that are transforming the labor of screenwriting, as well as our collective understanding of the profession. Our conclusion pushes the definition of the screenwriter firmly past its conventional and preconvergent boundaries while reflecting on how those obsolete boundaries are nonetheless being solidified in today’s film schools.

But first, and given the discussion about evidence and method above as critical to our project, we position Off the Page in the context of the scholarly models that have been applied to the academic study of screenwriting. We, too, follow in the footsteps of giants.

THE SCHOLARSHIP FACTORY

Of all the major craft disciplines involved in the production of motion pictures, screenwriting has been, until recently, the least studied and theorized within film and media studies. The academic literature on directing, acting, editing, cinematography, and sound is generally better established. With few exceptions the screenwriting profession is rarely mentioned outside introductory film production or history textbooks—outside, to use the language of film theory and criticism, auteur, star, style, and, until recently, industry studies. When film and media studies engage with the question of story, the focus is typically on narration and discourse as it is manifest in finished films; also writing and development threaten to get in the way of auteur theory.⁸ As a result, with few exceptions, the primary structuring text for what we see on the screen, the screenplay, slips past scholarly scrutiny. Historically, we academics have not been doing our part to challenge the common sense of screenwriting practice and the profession.

An instructive example can be found in the otherwise admirable standard history of Hollywood in the 1980s, Stephen Prince’s A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980–1989.⁹ In his chapter on the filmmakers of the period, Prince is rightly keen to acknowledge the importance of creative contributions beyond stars and directors. He makes space for sections assessing the most influential below the line talent, or cinematographers, production designers, and editors, among others, who have rates but whose salaries are not fixed and can vary depending on actual work performed. Prince acknowledges that screenwriters should be grouped with above the line talent, or those receiving residuals, like the directors, producers, and stars, whose salaries are negotiated and fixed in the budget. Prince, however, gives screenwriters no section of their own and focuses entirely on the other craft professions. This oversight notwithstanding, every film made by Hollywood is based on a screenplay that was written by one or more screenwriters.

Recent interventions within what film and media scholars call industry studies have begun to expand our understanding of the discourses, labor, and ideology of the craft. Notable contributions include the work of the Screenwriting Research Network; Kevin Alexander Boon’s Script Culture and the American Screenplay; Steven Maras’s Screenwriting: History, Theory, and Practice; Steven Price’s The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism; the collection edited by Jill Nelmes, Analyzing the Screenplay; and Bridget Conor’s Screenwriting: Creative Labor and Professional Practice.¹⁰ All have been published in the last decade or so. We believe that industry studies, along with the related field of production culture studies, offers the greatest promise for developing an in-depth critical approach to the screenwriting profession and the major role it has played and continues to play in Hollywood mythmaking.

Of particular note is Miranda Banks’s The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild, which provides a rich, rigorous, and critically insightful analysis of the historical role screenwriters and the WGA have played in Hollywood filmmaking and attendant discourses since the turn of the millennium.¹¹ Banks also considers contemporary production culture—the conditions of preproduction and production filmmaking informing the working life of screenwriters—in ways that are both critical and instructional. Banks’s analysis of the WGA’s ambivalent role in both supporting screenwriter rights and limiting membership in the profession is particularly insightful and undergirds our analysis of tentpole cinema in chapter 2.

For all of its insightful points, Banks’s work—and the work of many of the aforementioned industry studies texts—does not engage fully with the complexity of the screenplay text, its format, and its prose since the turn of the century. No single book can cover all dimensions of a complex phenomenon like screenwriting, but Banks’s work is the best sustained historical analysis of American screenwriting yet published. Few academic books actually engage in close analysis of the style, format, and tropes—in short, the textuality—of screenplays as a way to reveal how the widgets of the professional writer, the results of her labor, articulate both story and power dynamics.

When they do address the screenplay-as-text, analyses are usually broad and the points illustrative but general. Nelmes’s edited collection, Analyzing the Screenplay, is a case in point. It offers a broad, international perspective on script analysis and its related industrial practices. Borrowing from both film historiography and theory, Analyzing the Screenplay looks at the screenplay as an industrial form rather than screenwriting as a set of creative and institutional practices or as a locus of debate within larger shifts occurring in the culture of filmmaking, script reading, and film viewing. Contributors to Nelmes’s collection tend to reinforce the orthodox notion that the screenplay is the default object of screenwriting studies and, in so doing, fail to accept the challenge offered by the emerging and, in many cases, already proven arenas in which writers have seen their words transformed into moving pictures.

Andrew Horton and Julian Hoxter’s coedited collection, Screenwriting, focuses on the history of screenwriting as a craft and thus offers a sort of history to Off The Page.¹² Their book offers broad historical insights in terms of Maras’s practitioner, story and structure, business, and discourse frames. But because the focus of the contributors to Horton and Hoxter’s collection is largely on the history of screenwriting before the turn of the present century, its coverage of the contemporary industrial moment is narrower and far less substantial than what we aim to cover here. The same could be said of Steven Price’s otherwise admirable A History of the Screenplay, which also falls short of engaging at length with the broader contemporary moment